Garote's
Dream Asylum

I don't pretend to understand them.

22-dec-98

Dreamed that I was involved in some kind of live role-playing game, and the stakes were my sanity. It was played on a floating square divided into checkerboard with ramps leading up to a central pyramid-shaped structure. A king presided on a throne at one side of the board, and there was a square ring of tiles enclosing the whole board like a moat.

I jumped onto the perimiter tiles, escaping the swordblow of an enemy, but slipped and fell flat, barely avoiding the bottomless fall into the moat. About this time the king summoned the personification of death, a huge humanoid figure with a scythe and a chromed silver head. He flew over to me and passed into my body. My vision faded like I'd put on a pair of sunglasses, and the game stopped.

I didn't want to be dead, but it was the rules of the game. I decided to restore. So I was running around on the checkerboard trying to get to one of the ramps, so I could make progress -- but the timer expired early, and the king summoned death once again. As death floated near I grabbed it on the shoulders, challenging it, staring it in the silver face.

The face began to warp and change, and I was looking at the faces of people I knew. It took immense concentration to challenge death, and I began to growl and then to scream. The air got thick and zaps of static electricity blanketed death as it's face morphed from person to person. I was pressing death through the strainer of my mind, squeezing it's essence out of the infinite forms it could take. Very Super-Gokuh, I had death in a mental press and was wrapped around the handle.

I saw my own face a few more times, screaming back at me, or just staring, and the process accelarated. My sight dimmed and shrank, and there was a tremendous sucking implosion as everything I knew was drawn into a point in death's face and there was blackness. The blackness was permanent: I had destroyed death, but destroyed myself at the same time. Then I woke up. Oh, happy!